> I've always been a bit extreme on this but I more than ever believe that it's insane that we consider that leaving teenagers with unsupervised internet access is reasonable.

I grew up on the internet. I first connected with I was 11. I was first online by myself soon thereafter. I practiced writing on the internet while hanging out on the internet. I made friends on the internet. I made mistakes on the internet. I lost friends on the internet. I learned about Linux and programming on the internet. I got a job on the internet. All of this happened before I was 16. There is an old joke, one that I took to heart as a child, "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog". On the internet, nobody knew (or at least cared) that I wasn't an adult. People accepted my patches, took my advice, flamed my half-baked ideas, and overall treated me as an equal.

As a young adult I started internet companies over the internet with business partners I met on the internet. I met love interests on the internet. I found new music leading to concerts, festivals, and road trips on the internet. I learned about Magic: the Gathering strategy, met a lot of friends, and coordinated cross-continent travel over the internet with people I had only interacted with via IRC.

> Maybe I'm prude or naive but I remember vividly when I first saw a pornographic movie at like around 17. It really shook me at the time. I wasn't traumatized or anything but it made a strong impact on me.

People are different. Maybe I'm a degenerate. I grew up watching The Simpsons and Beavis and Butthead. In middle school, friends would trade porno mags. A friend had the premium cable channels with "Skin-a-max" (Cinemax) playing late nights. When I first got online (at 11 years old), I had two priorities: porn and learning how to hack like I saw in some movies (Wargames, Ferris Bueler's Day Off).

Finding porn was easy since the "filters" were mostly someone who largely didn't care configuring a default search engine or maybe a DNS blacklist. Once I knew "search engine", finding more search engines that weren't filtered was easy. A couple queries about how filtering works and I knew enough to configure a different DNS resolver. It's not like I went looking for Pokemon tips and found hardcore XXX action.

In trying to learn about hacking, I stumbled onto ESR's "Hacker Howto". I took it to heart, printed it out, and pasted sections on my bedroom wall. "The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved. No problem should ever have to be solved twice. Boredom and drudgery are evil. Freedom is good. Attitude is no substitute for competence." I kept this as a mantra. I took the "Basic Hacking Skills" section as a formula. Python, C, Lisp, Perl, Java. Check. Check. Check. Check. Check. Learn to use a *nix? Done. I never was especially good at red team offensive security, but "how to hack" put into a search bar changed my life for the better.

> These days I expect that most teens experience this at like 12yo on their smartphones. Last week I was linked a reddit video of some guy dying in absolutely gruesome circumstance due to an industrial accident. And then there's the constant influx of disinformation. Did you know that Hydroxychloroquine cures HIV? I saw a Youtube video claiming just that yesterday.

At least in my day, we learned skepticism early on the internet. Everyone can be an asshole and most accounts would troll you. Getting razzed for your naivete in a chat room or message board was a rite of passage. Bullshit comes in a lot of flavors, and some people needed to taste the rainbow and while others were quicker on the pickup.

I could never deny others the chance to gain what I have gained by restricting their ability to access the internet.